Knowledge management analogies & stories Part I

I don't know about you, but I often find that people have a preconcieved notion of what knowledge is, which prevents them from having a useful conversation about how it might be managed. I'm not convinced that it can be "managed" - maybe, using the same differentiation between leading and managing people, knowledge can be "led"? Anyway, the point is, I've been collecting analogies and stories to help me explain what I'm talking about re: KM in general, and to explain why I feel so strongly that tacit knowledge cannot, in essence, be captured (see this post and this post). I thought I'd share some of them with you.

The Salad Analogy - Information & Knowledge & Wisdom
Borrowed from Mr Mike Kelleher, senior consultant at the British Quality Foundation
Information tells us that that red round thing with pips in is a tomato is, knowledge tells us that it is a fruit, wisdom tells us that despite the fact it is a fruit, it doesn't go well in a fruit salad.

The Driving Analogy
Intuitively developed by me despite the fact it's used by many other people...
When you learn to drive a car, you do so by actually driving a car. The theory of road use can be gained from a book, but any real ability to drive is gained by driving. That is the difference between theory (information) and practice (knowledge). However, tacit, intuitive knowledge comes to us when we've had many years of idiot drivers pulling out of the middle lane of the motorway without warning. It's a feeling, a sensation of "better watch that car!" and cannot easily be articulated so that someone else could practice it. However, many frequent and long distance drivers know what I'm talking about...

Teaching by the book
A lovely analogy from Larry Prusak, on his site, tells of how he was once on a baseball team, but "was by far the worst hitter on the team". His father gave him a book on The Art of Hitting. Despite pratically memorising the book, he still couldn't hit. This is, as Prusak says,

"...a story I tell people who insist that knowledge can be codified, that humans are interchangeable. There are still many facets of life and work that are art not science, and wise managers understand how to manage both."

I'll post these as I come across them, and I promise to test them first, after all, it's not just about theory, it's about practice...

Critical reflection, knowledge sharing and the learning cycle

Having more or less given up on the concept of tacit knowledge, in terms of completely failing to discover a way of identifying demonstrations of tacit knowledge in blog postings, I've been examining reflection as an alternative route to identifying knowledge with value for the development and improvement of pratice.

In doing so, I remembered the good old learning cycle, developed by Kolb and utilised by Honey and Mumford in their work on learning styles...

Going back to Kolb, I started thinking about his learning cycle in terms of a community of practice, particulary in relation to the concrete experience element. How do people get to know about the experiences of others? Through sharing reflection.

To share experieince, one must have to some extent thought about it. In thinking about knowledge sharing, I've linked what Boud would call Returning to Experience to the 1st stage of Kolb's learning cycle, as this descriptive stage of reflection does not involve a critique, but is merely a description of what happened. To some extent, if we avoid the philosophical debate around knowledge, we can call this, or at least liken it, to explicit knowlege.

Moving onto the next stage of Kolb's cycle, critical reflection, we are considering the emotions and outcomes associated with the experience. This sounds to me something like tacit knowledge...and it's these elements of the experience that hold the utility of the practice - the stuff that we really should be sharing.

If critical reflection can be utilised by a group, they can more effectively validate any reflection, both at the descriptive level, but more usefully, at the abstract conceptulisation and active experimentation stages. This is a powerful medium for testing new outcomes and learning as a group from the experiences of individuals. Each individual thus gains more from the critical reflection of one person than that person alone.

Ideally then, the group learns more individually due to the groups multiple conceptualisations, experiements, reflections and experiences.

Unfortunately, this implies that we must

• Learn to reflect, descriptively and critically, in terms of repeatable processes and procedures and potential new practice
• Learn to articluate those reflections, by writing, conversation, networking
• Learn to read, listen to, review and analyse those reflections in terms of our own practice
• Learn to collaborate in our abstract conceptualisation
• Learn to collaborate in our testing of hypotheses generate by our abstract conceptualisation

It's never simple is it...

Prediction by Gartner on tacit knowledge

I found a great article on ELearn Magazine by Eric Sauve, CEO and Co-Founder, Tomoye Corporation called Communities of Practice: Addressing Workforce Trends Through New Learning Models

Eric notes that

industry analyst firm Gartner estimates that the frequency of non-routine situations requiring tacit knowledge will double between 2006 and 2010. The reality is most organizations' situations change rapidly, making formal training once or twice a year inadequate. Organizations would be well-advised to shift budgets and resources from formal learning settings to informal situations where the majority of learning actually takes place.

The definition of tacit knowledge here is

complex interactions which require that people handle ambiguity and solve
problems based on experience

but how on earth do you measure this? I'd be interested to see the metrics Gartner used to came up with their prediction.

I'm definately all for shifting focus from formal training, which I believe people tend to jump to at the exclusion of all other learning opportunties (maybe because they are more difficult to manage?)

A useful introduction to communities of pratice though...

Tacit knowledge - an unhelpful term for knowledge management?

Philosophically, tacit knowledge is a complex area. Widely taken to be a classic theory of tacit knowledge, Nonaka and Takeuchi's defininition tacit knowledge is that it is part of a dynamic process, part of a spiral of knowledge creation whereby knowledge moves through the following "states".

• socialisation - sharing through face to face interaction
• externalisation - developing concepts which incorporate tacit knowledge, making it communicable
• combination - combining elements of explicit knowledge
• internalisation - explicit knowledge is "internalised" and practicable

Nonaka and Takeuchi state that tacit knowledge is somehow externalised, stating that it somehow changes states from tacit to explict knowledge, a theory which is based on that of Michael Polanyi However, their theory moves away from Polanyi's, where tacit knowledge is subsidiary, present in the mind, but not directly attended to.

Where focal knowledge is knowledge that one refers to directly when making a knowledgable statement, tacit or subisiary knowledge is

• Active in the mind, but not consciously accessed
• Enables or causes the focal knowing

According to Polanyi, one cannot KNOW tacit knowledge, tacit knowledge supports explicit knowledge. It can't be changed into another TYPE of knowledge.

What Nonaka and Takeuchi are saying then, is like saying bricks can become a house, when in actual fact, a house is the sum of it's parts, bricks. The bricks are still bricks.

Another analogy that springs to mind is that of the psychoanalytic descriptors, the unconscious and the conscious.

Freud understood the unconcious as that part of mental functioning of which subjects make themselves unaware. It affects behaviour, but acts at a level beyond normal comprehension. Freuds somewhat negative interprettation of the unconscious, that it is a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. (see Wikipedia entry) means a direct comparison with tacit knowledge is problematic, but Carl Jungs idea of the unconscious, what he termed the collective unconscious, better relates to the concept of tacit knowledge as Polanyi describes it.

The collective unconscious directs the self, via amongst other things, intuition, toward self actualisation. In Humanist terms, tacit knowledge directs knowledge to enable a person to self-actualise.

To return to the philosophical notion of tacit knowledge, a fascinating article by Stefan Gueldenberg and Holger Helting, "Bridging the Great Divide - Nonaka's Synthesis of Western and Eastern knowledge concepts reassessed" considers the influence of Heidegger on Polanyi's thinking.

Heidegger proposed a philosophical notion of tacit knowledge whereby he describes it in terms of examining foreign cultures, where interaction with foreign cultures can shed light on what is tacitly understood. He noted that such interactions help identify things that appear to be self-explanatory and familiar, so no conscious note is taken of it.

Heidegger says we should seek out "foreign" experiences to more fully understand our own culture and experience. Something like "walk a mile in another mans shoes" to understand your own journey.

"Sojourn in foreign realms and the process of alienation within those realms must take place in order for that which is one's own to being glowing in light of that which is foreign." (Heidegger 1992, 175)

So to understand what we know tacitly, we need to look differently at the experiences of others to see what it is we know ourselves.

How does this help us to share tacit knowledge? Well, the above highlights the difficulty with the concept of tacit knowledge itself, that by Polanyi's definition it is unknowable. It's the personal, experiential building blocks of that build our explicit knowledge.

What does this mean for knowledge management? I feel that unless we develop a system of interprettation of tacit knowledge akin to the way the psychoanalytic movement strove to interpret the unconscious, we're going to be none the wiser. And we don't really understand the unconscious, or even agree what it is.

Maybe the best we can do is develop Heidegger's idea, that in considering how others do things, we gain some insight into how WE know. Sounds strangely like reflection to me...

In conclusion then...

Practically speaking, to understand good practice in terms of what we do that works, and sharing that knowledge with others, a move away from the philosophically challenging area of the nature of knowledge, particularly the notion of tacit knowledge, and a return to the notion of reflection and reflective practice, may yield far greater returns for knowledge management.

Every community of practice needs a focus

Something Caroline DeBrun from the National Library for Health (who runs the Talking Knowledge Management blog along with many other KM activities and sites) said in her presentation at the CILIP event yesterday has struck a chord with me.

She mentioned that she personally used blogs for reflection, and wikis for collaboration. I agree, that seems a sensible and effective use of both technologies, but what she said made me really think about potential activities a wiki would be perfect for, and which would facilitate knowledge sharing, particularly the sharing of lessons learned from the experience of project management.

It's becoming clear to me that what we (NHS CFH) are trying to gather and utilise, primarily tacit knowledge based on experience which is difficult to articulate, is nigh on impossible to collect with a blog. There may be many reasons for this, and it may not be true of all organisations or group blogs, but what I think might work is to focus more on faciliating community development via collaborate activity. This should in turn, increase community cohesion and encourage a culture of sharing.

Acknowledging that people really need to focus on activity which improves practice within their particular domain if they are to function as a community of practice, I think rather than asking people to write about their own experiences and lessons learned, we should ask them to collectively create guidance for others, using a wiki. This should draw out experiences and knowledge that they wouldn't offer up in iscolation on a blog. To a certain extent, it's getting them to share their tacit knowledge without knowing that's what they are doing. Crafty...

I can't believe I didn't think of that before...amazing what happens when you look up for a moment, look around, and listen to what others are saying.

Definately one for the recommended research section of the dissertation.